


Continuity, Change, and Casting: "The Timeless Children"

by PlaidAdder



Series: Doctor Who Meta [18]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode Review, Fandom, Gen, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:53:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25624702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: It is apparently going to be a rule that every new Doctor Who showrunner does a major reset of the show’s mythology about Gallifrey and the Time Lords. The purpose of it, as far as I can tell, is to create what the new showrunner considers a clear field for the stories he wants to tell. It is to some extent, then, always a utilitarian decision. Chris Chibnall has now done his own reboot, for what seem to me to be very specific reasons.
Relationships: The Doctor | Ruth Clayton & Thirteenth Doctor, Thirteenth Doctor & The Master (Dhawan)
Series: Doctor Who Meta [18]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/68261
Comments: 9
Kudos: 9





	Continuity, Change, and Casting: "The Timeless Children"

[Originally posted by thirteenstardisfam](https://tmblr.co/ZjfMjXXyJkBtaa00)

OK, it’s late and I’m gonna be quick but I have many feelings about this.

First of all, technically, this was a good episode. It’s been a long time since Doctor Who has been able to get me this worried about the Doctor’s ultimate survival. I was annoyed by the way it would every once in a while come to a crashing halt while the Master slung another exposition monologue at us. Otherwise, A+ quality season finale.

About that Matrix stuff.

It is apparently going to be a rule that every new Doctor Who showrunner does a major reset of the show’s mythology. The purpose, as far as I can tell, is to create what the new showrunner considers a clear field for the stories he wants to tell. It is to some extent, then, always a utilitarian decision. RTD decided to blow up Gallifrey during the Time War, which is supposed to have taken place right before S1E1. I’ve read various rationales for this, including the argument that eliminating Gallifrey would make it easier for new viewers to enter the show, because the many decades of continuity and lack of continuity surrounding the Doctor’s relationship to his home planet would no longer be relevant. The Time War also changed some basic things about the Doctor’s personality–and, by the time we hit the end of RTD’s era, it had also changed one of the defining things about the Doctor’s ethics, which was his rejection of genocide as always indefensible. Between S1 and S4, RTD’s conception of the Time War migrated from a collective act of self-sacrifice (Nine says “my people were destroyed but they took the Daleks with them) to the revelation in “The End of Time” that the Doctor just unilaterally decided to blow up Gallifrey because the Time Lords were otherwise going to destroy the universe. I always hated that development, and I personally just pretend “End of Time” never happened. 

When Moffat took over, he used “Day of the Doctor,” the 50th anniversary episode, to reboot all of that, and for once I applauded him for it. Ten and Eleven went back on their own timeline and un-did the destruction of Gallifrey. They then wound up helping seal it in a “pocket universe” for reasons I rather forget. There it safely stayed until Twelve rediscovered it. His return there at the end of S9 was vastly anticlimactic and it made me wish Moffat had just let Gallifrey be lost. But anyway.

Chris Chibnall has now done his own reboot, for what seem to me to be very specific reasons. The whole “timeless child” story seems to me to be a very deliberate attempt to prepare the fandom for a Doctor who is not white.

Again, it’s late, so, bullet points:

* It is now canon that the Doctor **has already been a person of color, many times.** So when the Doctor’s next regeneration is a person of color, nobody can complain about it. I mean, they will, but they will have to go against canon to do it. 

* Because the Doctor has lost vast swaths of her memory, there is a potentially infinite number of Doctors we could encounter, even during Thirteen’s run, who are people of color. 

* The turning point of the Doctor’s encounter with the Matrix comes when Ruth asks Thirteen, “When have you ever been limited by your past?” and she’s like, oh, yeah, never. That entire conversation is addressed, on the meta-level, to fans who might have bitched about the Doctor becoming a woman and might yet bitch about the Doctor becoming a person of color: you can handle the concept of a Doctor whose history and origins are different from what you thought they were. Indeed, you must, because otherwise the Master wins.

And this brings me to the other interesting thing about this episode, which is that it uses the Master to make it clear that anyone who is bothered by the idea that the Doctor is/was/will be a person of color is on the wrong side of, well, freaking EVERYTHING. To wit:

* The Master is so unglued by the discovery of his own genetic impurity–the fact that there is “a little piece of You” in his DNA–that he burns down the whole fucking planet and decides to create an army of immortal conscienceless stormtroopers. So if this wasn’t clear before, the Master is a fascist. 

* But it’s not just him; the Time Lords are also jackasses and they seem to have been engaged in a conspiracy to suppress the fact that the Doctor hasn’t always been white. By removing the Doctor’s memories of her time as the Timeless Child, they’ve deliberately suppressed the part of her life when she wasn’t presenting as white. This is emphasized when Ruth is revealed as the Doctor in “Fugitive from the Judoon,” and the Doctor herself refuses to accept Ruth as one of her avatars: “I’ve never been anyone remotely like you. I would have remembered.” In fact, she can’t remember, because they’ve deleted all of that not only from her memory but from the Matrix. Someone has also disguised her memories of working for the Division–I assume that’s the period that Ruth!Doctor hails from, and that this is the ‘job’ that she fired herself from and that that’s what got her on the Judoon’s hit list–specifically by filtering them through this imaginary 50s-movie Ireland in which everyone is white and the whole thing is just fake as a three-dollar bill. So the Time Lords have been engaging in some serious whitewashing.

* Thus, the ‘traditional’ casting of this role–the fact that all 13 Doctors up to this point have been played by white actors–is now recontextualized, not as sacred canonical Tradition, but as a load of bullshit fabricated by the Time Lords to cover up their own sins and crimes. 

* So the Doctor wins by being able to assimilate this information and to realize that recovering this repressed history–even if it contains unknowns and things she’ll never fully understand–makes her stronger and better. Whereas the Master, as she says, can’t handle this new canon because he’s “scared of everything.” Much like the fans who can’t handle a Doctor who’s not a white man.

I am here for all of this. Except that there is this one large irony in that the character who is able to embrace the Doctor’s diversity and multiplicity is currently being played by a white actor, while the character who is now very closely identified with racism and fascism is currently being played by a person of color.

And then we get into the question of how the hell the Master managed to kill all of Gallifrey, prevent everyone from regenerating, and then somehow manage to reanimate their corpses in regeneratable form. But I’m gonna have to leave it here because, again, it’s late. I’m glad we’re going to see Thirteen and fam again in January. I hope maybe we’ll see Jack again too. I look forward to Fourteen–but I really hope we get another year or two of Thirteen, I’m very attached now.


End file.
